


Perhaps the Self-Same Song

by bastet_in_april, doorwaytoparadise



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Community: Do It With Style Events, Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang, Historical Accuracy, Historical Figures, Historical Inaccuracy, Historical References, M/M, Multi, Mutual Pining, Regency Period, Romantic Poetry, Romantic art, The Lake District, The Year Without A Summer, landscapes, romantic movement
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-12
Updated: 2021-02-12
Packaged: 2021-03-12 10:42:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,669
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29383647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bastet_in_april/pseuds/bastet_in_april, https://archiveofourown.org/users/doorwaytoparadise/pseuds/doorwaytoparadise
Summary: The year is 1816, and strange weather phenomena are occurring all around the world. The summer is disturbingly cold and stormy, and there are whispers among the humans that the lack of a true summer portends the end of the world. Aziraphale has been sent to influence the poets of the Lake District, and Crowley makes his excuses to join the angel there on an assignment of his own. Aziraphale, pretending to be an aspiring writer, and Crowley, pretending to be an up-and-coming artist, gradually confront the romantic feelings they have for one another, as they are forced to share a cottage with one another. The art and writing they create becomes a way to express their love for one another, as they explore the Lake District together, and grapple with the possibility that the world may be ending ahead of schedule.
Relationships: Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Kudos: 9
Collections: Do It With Style Good Omens Reverse Bang





	Perhaps the Self-Same Song

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Good Omens Reverse Bang event. My collaborator was sungmee/doorwaytoparadise. Check out sungmee's art here: https://sungmee.tumblr.com.
> 
> Shout-out to Ecchima, as well, who inspired this fic and its period setting!

**1815**

For nearly two weeks, the sky was on fire. Cataclysmic torrents of lava and massive ocean waves wiped out thousands of people. Clouds of ash blotted out the sun, and debris fell in an unwelcome rain on the islands around Mt. Tambora. The terrible disease and famine that followed would be worse. To the people of Indonesia, it felt as though the apocalypse had come. The rest of humanity--and one demon and one angel--preoccupied with the mundanities of what to wear to the next garden party, which politician had bribed their way into what office, and who had the most scandalous dance card, took a bit longer to notice the signs. 

***

It was a fine June day. Or, it might have been, if it weren’t for the pea-sized hailstones rattling against the glass panes of Crowley’s fashionable Mayfair flat. The Kentia palm next to them had the nerve to look relieved to be indoors with Crowley, rather than out in the foul weather. Crowley gave it a quelling glare, and peered out onto the street below. The street was an ugly sucking churn of mud and rain. At Crowley’s glance, the wheel of an elegant high-seat phaeton stuck firm in the muck, jolting the unfortunate driver off of his seat and into the brown puddle below. The horse, pleased to be relieved of the extra burden, turned around and began making its way back towards its warm stable, and a dinner of oats and hay, carriage and all. The corner of Crowley’s mouth ticked up in satisfaction. At the corner of the street, an itinerant preacher was clutching his placard over his head in a feeble attempt to shelter from the hailstones, as he dashed towards the shelter of the nearest public house. _The End Times Have Come! Are You Prepared for ARMAGEDDON? Repent Your Sins and Seek Salvation!_ The sign proclaimed in large accusative letters. The smile on Crowley’s face vanished.

“I would know,” Crowley muttered. “I’d know if something _that_ big was happening. There’d be… a memo, at least.” Wouldn’t there? Normally, Crowley would have dug one of his commendations out of the drawer he stored them in, in order to reassure himself that he was a valued employee of the Infernal bureaucracy.(1) This time, though, the commendations were a reminder of how little attention Hell paid to what Crowley actually got involved in, on Earth. Normally, this was exactly how Crowley preferred it, but now…

The thing was, this year had sort of felt like the end of the world. Wild and unseasonable storms had devastated crops, hundreds of inexplicably dead fish had washed up on the shores of rivers and lakes, birds had fallen out of the skies mid-flight. It had snowed a week ago. Today, on what should have been a fine day in June, hail rained down from the skies and shallow puddles had a thin skin of ice. The skies sometimes burned red, or a venomous yellow uncomfortably similar to the color of Crowley’s eyes. It was enough to make the humans nervous, to make them wonder what it was all leading to. 

It was enough to make Crowley wonder, too. 

Crowley sighed, and sank down into the chair at his writing desk. Aziraphale’s letter was still sitting on the desk where Crowley had left it after reading it. He really ought to have burned it, just to be safe, but the familiar handwriting was a comfort even if the words were not.

Aziraphale had no more idea of what was happening than Crowley did, and was just as uneasy about matters. He had demurred Crowley’s suggestion that they investigate these signs and portents, explaining that he had been tasked by Heaven to seek out the visionary writers and artists of the age and guide them to inspire reverence and wonder. It was the sort of assignment that Aziraphale should have been over the moon about, and the sort of assignment that Heaven rarely assigned him. Heaven hardly concerned itself with the creativity, morale, and zeitgeist of humanity, especially in the past few hundred years. Aziraphale wasn’t over the moon, though. In his writing, he had seemed tense, uneasy to leave London. Unhappy to leave Crowley, Crowley dared to hope.

The other letter on the desk was unopened, but also addressed to Mr. Crowley in familiar handwriting.

_My Dear Mr. Crowley,_

_Your last letter seems to have brought the rain with it. It has poured in torrents upon the Chawton house as if it will never cease. I promise you, the South Downs is a most agreeable place, normally. The weather this year is abominable, and I miss reading in the garden or being able to take a stroll through the trees and fields. Surely, there is no greater place for one to retire. It hasn’t the excitement of London, but, in good company, a little cottage here can be greater than any fashionable London house._

_Trapped indoors by rain and my poor health, letters from my dear Cassandra keep me entertained. And your letters, too, of course, though they do bring out all my worst impulses. I know you shared your gossip about the prince to sharpen the blade of my words. I shall keep my peace, and follow the old adage: when one has nothing nice to say, say nothing. (I think this applies twice over when the subject of discussion is royal)._

_I know you appreciate my sharpness. Most do not. You have spoken often of your dearest friend, whose forthrightness is a blunt and dangerous thing and whose good intentions are certain, if not always realized. He reminds me of Emma, a heroine whom I expected no one but myself could much like. In which case, I like Mr. Fell very much. Especially because of how much you do._

_You like sharpness in things which should be soft and sweet, and so I find myself saying wicked things about my publisher, my family, Charles, and even the prince regent, in the hopes that they might make you laugh. I’m a terribly bored woman, and making you laugh is one of the few small pleasures of my life, along with seeing Cassandra, making an appropriate mockery of the sermons of Mr. Cooper, and adding lace to my new hat. I think you might rank above the hat, but it is a close contest. Do you bring out this wickedness in other writers? What about your artist friends? You’ll tempt all the bright young things to sarcasm and spite, and then where will this still-teenaged century be?_

_Give Mr. Fell my love, and please do write again soon._

_Yours affectionately,_

_J. Austen_

Crowley grinned. He had been trading letters with Jane since he had read _Sense and Sensibility._ (2) The writer had a sharp wit and a way of exposing petty human foibles that he appreciated. Tempting her to write what she really thought about things? He hadn’t been doing it intentionally, but it was true that it made him laugh. That idea about influencing the bright young minds of the generation, though…

If Crowley was honest with himself, he had been looking for an excuse to follow Aziraphale on his assignment. If the world really was nearing the end, he wanted to spend the remaining time with Aziraphale. If he was disrupting the work of a Heavenly agent, sowing discontent and dissolution among the influential creative types, Hell could hardly object.

Thinking about what cover story he wanted to use, Crowley dashed off a quick infernal memo, and began to pack.

***

Aziraphale really did wish that it would stop raining. The roof of the charming little cottage leaked terribly, and the whole countryside looked gray and sodden. Not even the new pamphlet of Shelley’s poetry--which Mr. Coleridge had called histrionic and overwrought; the nerve of the man--and the scrumptious bit of seed cake Aziraphale had picked up in the village could cheer him. And yet, Aziraphale found himself staring pensively at the little writing kit on his desk, part of his pretended role as a writer. He had stopped in the village in the hopes that there might be a letter awaiting him from Crowley. He had enclosed an address in the letter he had sent Crowley just before he had left London for this assignment in the Lake District. Aziraphale hadn’t asked Crowley to write, but… he had hoped. Was it too soon to send another letter?

Instead of picking up the pen, Aziraphale thumbed open his copy of _Guide to the Lakes,_ slightly battered from having been tucked into a coat pocket or bag while Aziraphale climbed over stones or explored meandering trails, pretending to be a Romantic poet in awe of the majesty of creation and the raw emotion of nature. Awe for nature wasn’t hard to summon up, even when the words to express it were. The sunsets were a violent red that made it look as if the horizon were bleeding, and the storm that had swept through last week had left trees shattered and uprooted with its ferocity. Aziraphale had had to make use of a judicious miracle to ensure that the cottage’s roof remained intact. 

When the sun was out, though, the countryside was lush and vivid green, lit up with patches of shifting sunlight, hidden and revealed by the swiftly moving white clouds. The hills swept down to meet the lakes, which were like places where the sky had spilled into the earth, vast blue-gray mirrors of the heavens above.

As little as Aziraphale liked climbing about hillsides in the unseasonably cold summer air, he could not fail to be moved. 

The rain and wind outside the cottage peaked to a momentary crescendo that had the shutters rattling. The fire lit in the fireplace hissed and smoked, as fat drops of rain found their way down the stone chimney. The scratching at the door was lost in the sounds of wind and water, but the door being abruptly flung wide had Aziraphale scrambling to chase the loose paper that had been in the open leather travel case before it was blown out of doors to disintegrate in the rain. He scowled fiercely at the thin, dark-haired man in the doorway.

“Crowley! What on _earth_ are you doing here?”

Crowley looked rain-soaked and miserable, shivering under his heavy coat. He hastily shut the door behind him. His hair was dripping. So was the coat. He looked utterly surprised to see the cottage occupied. “Oh, bloody-- Mrs. Lewis, in the village, rented me a room in this cottage. She said there was another lodger, but I assumed she’d have said that I was coming.” Crowley extracted a slightly damp pocket handkerchief and wiped his dark glasses dry before returning them to his face. “Also, I didn’t realize the other lodger was _you_.”

Aziraphale felt his surprise turning into offense. “There’s no need to say it like that. I’ll have you know that I’m a perfectly pleasant housemate.”

“No, I didn’t mean--” Crowley groaned in defeat. “Look, can I just dry off a bit and get warm. It’s raining like the eleventh plague out there.”

“Of course. It’s your cottage as much as mine, it seems.” Aziraphale sniffed, but fetched the warmest of the wool blankets from a cabinet, it’s fleecy green surface worn smooth and soft with use. Crowley hung up his coat and wrapped himself in it gratefully.

“Is sharing a home going to be a problem?” Crowley asked, settling into the chair closest to the fire. He was holding his hands out towards the flames to be warmed, getting what would have been dangerously close to the fire for a human being. “When we’re working, I mean? Only, we’re here at cross-purposes. Hell’s sent me to corrupt the artistic crowd, so they can corrupt the spirit of the age, or something like that. If you ask me, poets don’t need any demonic help to take up sex, drugs, and Schubert’s latest cantata.”

“No, no, of course not. I only thought you might have sent a letter ahead to tell me you were coming…?” It was a sore point, that unanswered letter, not least because the desire for an answering letter, even just a short note, had dogged Aziraphale’s thoughts for the entirety of the time he had been in the Lake District. Mrs. Dorothy Wordsworth had even suggested that he had the distracted look of a man pining for a sweetheart. Aziraphale sighed. His gaze returned to the figure slumped near the fire, long limbs stretched out, familiar face relaxing into contentment at the warmth. The whole room felt warmer than it had just minutes before. This was better than a letter, and more than Aziraphale had let himself think of. He looked away, and busied himself with finding the supplies to make tea.

“No, it won’t be a problem to have you here. It’s a relief, actually. If you’re here, canceling me out, perhaps I can stay out of this wretched weather by following you about to thwart you. Dinner with the Wordsworths is lovely, but this rain… I can hardly believe it’s the summer.”

Crowley grimaced, looking uneasy at the mention of the weather. “Not sure that’ll work, angel. I’m pretending to be a landscape painter. There’s likely to be more tramping about the hillsides if you follow me, not less.”

“A painter?”

“Yeah, picked up a thing or two from Leonardo. And Carravagio did like to talk up his art, in between drunken flirtation and bar brawls.”

“Mm. This modern stuff is quite different, though. These Romantics look down their noses at you if you can’t capture the emotion of a storm-tossed sea, or the scale of the sky in relation to the smallness of man, or what have you.”

“I’ll manage. I met Hubert Robert, you know--one of the early ones, in France. Obsessed with ruins, liked painting out-of-doors.” Crowley found his hands abruptly full of a mug of tea, which he took gratefully. “What about you? Playing at being a publisher?”

Aziraphale winced. “That might have been wiser. No, I am an aspiring poet. I’m here to see the singular landscape of the Lake District, and to seek inspiration from the founding poets of the Romantic movement--Coleridge, Wordsworth, Southey--as Byron, Keats, and so many of the younger generation of Romantic poets have done. In reality, of course, I will be inspiring them, rather than the other way around.”

“I heard Byron, Keats, and that lot weren’t very impressed with their predecessors when they visited. The likes of Colridge and Wordsworth aren’t radical enough in their thinking for the younger crowd.”

Aziraphale grimaced. “I admit, I found them a bit conservative in their views. I quite enjoy Shelley and Keats. Mr. Coleridge does not share my esteem for their work.”

Crowley sipped his tea. “Ooh, a nice generational conflict spiced with a bit of jealousy. Should make my job easier.”

Aziraphale said nothing, sinking into another chair near the fire. He felt more at ease than he had in weeks. The storm outside seemed far away, despite the leaky roof and creaking shutters.

***

The next day dawned clear and dry.(3) Aziraphale, who believed that the hours most people used for sleep were much better spent reading, was already awake when Crowley dragged himself from his bed.(4)

“Breakfast?”

“Ugh.”

After two cups of tea so strong you could stand a spoon up in it, Crowley was feeling a bit more functional. 

“So, what’s the plan for today?”

Aziraphale frowned. “Well, Mr. Coleridge is having a dinner party in a couple of weeks. It’s to be quite a large event, with music, dancing, and readings. There should be a number of writers and artists there. If we want to influence the influencers, as it were, that’s the best place to do it. The trouble, of course, is getting invited. So, I think the best way forward is to shore up our credentials as up-and-coming Romantic artists.”

“Good thing it stopped raining. Shall we pack lunch?”

Aziraphale brightened at the thought. “We could have a picnic!” Then he hesitated, brought short by his own uncertainty about the appropriateness of the enthusiasm. He hastily added, “it would be a human thing to do. We must keep up appearances.” Aziraphale wrung his hands.

“Right. You take care of lunch. I’ll get my paints. Don’t forget your notebook!” Crowley turned away towards the heavy trunk at the end of his bed.

Crowley hated seeing Aziraphale second-guess himself. The angel had been doing it from their very first meeting, when he had worried whether giving his flaming sword to the humans was the right choice for an angel to have made. Crowley thought Aziraphale was a lot happier when he was not thinking about what Heaven might want, but about what Aziraphale himself wanted. Generally, that was for people to be happy, for customers to his bookshop to be few, and for food and alcohol to be plentiful and exciting. 

Crowley hoped that the list of things that Aziraphale wanted also included Crowley. Crowley drinking Aziraphale’s wine at the end of the plush couch in the bookshop’s backroom as they commiserated about the latest ridiculous memo from their respective head offices. Crowley bringing Aziraphale gifts and trinkets to try to say the things he couldn’t seem to put in words: filigree silver snuff boxes, pastries that looked like little jewels, pearl earrings, mildly obscene illuminated manuscripts. Crowley dragging Aziraphale along to see the latest mad thing the human had come up with: the hot air balloon, the Leaning Tower of Pisa, dance cards, telescopes. Crowley, in Aziraphale’s life, for the rest of eternity. However long that turned out to be.

When Crowley had finished collecting his painting supplies, Aziraphale was packing up cloth wrapped sandwiches, some sliced cheeses and apples, and small cakes studded with currants. Once his bag was packed, Aziraphale settled it onto his shoulder, a slightly worn guidebook with a number of bookmarks sticking out of it tucked under one arm. Aziraphale opened the door, gesturing for Crowley to precede him out into the sunlight.

The cold was bracing, but the sun was out for once in this blessed strange summer. Crowley grinned at Aziraphale. “Well, shall we ‘wander lonely as a cloud’?”

“Not so many clouds,” Aziraphale murmured looking up at the blue expanse of sky stretching towards mountainous crags. He glanced at Crowley, sideways and hopeful under the sweep of his pale lashes. “Nor lonely, I hope.”

Crowley had no idea what his face was doing. His throat had constricted around all of the words he wanted to say until he was only able to utter an articulate noise and turn away, setting off along the dirt track that led towards Lake Grasmere. The land around them was smooth pastureland, lush and green in some places, unnaturally early autumnal brown in others. At the edges of each pasture were solitary oak trees or ancient, deteriorating walls of stacked unmortared stones, markers of boundaries created by human beings. The valley seemed to catch and hold the wind sweeping down from the mountains, and Crowley wrapped his coat tighter around himself. Aziraphale, walking behind Crowley, made a noise of triumph as he extracted a clearly hand-knitted scarf from his bag, thrusting it into Crowley’s hand. Crowley regarded the woolen garment with deep suspicion.

“You’re shivering so obviously, I could hardly fail to notice,” Aziraphale pointed out. “Put it on; it will keep you warm.”

“It’s very… fuzzy.”

“It’s a scarf. It’s supposed to be.” Aziraphale rolled his eyes heavenward, as if asking for patience. “Your ego will survive, Crowley.”

Crowley glared, and wrapped the scarf around his neck. It was very warm, and smelled faintly of the ink and tea leaves that had been in Aziraphale’s bag. “If you tell anyone I wore this, I’m going to spread it around London that a certain bookshop is having a half-off sale.”

“Your secret is safe with me, Beau Brummell.”

“Ugh. Don’t joke. The man had his boots washed with champagne. Waste of perfectly good champagne, if you ask me.”

Aziraphale had fished out the guidebook, and had it open as he walked. Occasionally, he would read a passage aloud to Crowley.

“ _‘_ _The feeling of solitude is seldom more strongly and more solemnly impressed than by the side of one of these mountain pools; though desolate and forbidding, it seems a distinct place to repair to, yet where the visitants must be rare, and there can be no disturbance—Water fowl flock hither; and the lonely angler may oftentimes here be seen; but the imagination, not content with this, is tempted to attribute a voluntary power to every change which takes place in such a spot, whether it be the breeze that wanders over the surface of the water, or the splendid lights of evening that rest upon it in the midst of the awful precipices.’_ ” Aziraphale sighed. “Oh, how lovely. We must see if we can picnic somewhere with a view of a Tarn. Or of a lake.”

The dirt track had narrowed and faded into nonexistence, and they were now forging a path through the untrod wilds. It was still pastureland, but, as they climbed, the fields began to look less manicured, until finally they gave way to uncultivated land, dense with ferns and dewy with the recent rains. The soil was iron-rich and, in some places, springs bubbled up clear, but stained stones red. Purple saxifrage and pale pink woodland phlox were trying to bloom, despite the chill and the icy rains. 

As they climbed, they passed stands of birch, paper white trunks shining in the sun. Juniper, heather, and broom began to make the path difficult, but none of the vegetation was so dense as to be impassable. A yellow butterfly hovered for a moment next to Crowley, darting around his head of crimson hair, before fluttering away again to settle on a lichen-covered stone, sunning itself.

At one point, they stumbled onto the remains of an ancient chapel. Its roof had caved in, and only the foundations and three of the walls remained, the stone skeleton of the building bare and gaping, exposed to the sun and the rain. It was wild now, claimed by the birds that darted into little gaps in the masonry, carrying straw and twigs to make nests, and by the glossy-leaved ivy that climbed its walls. Crowley looked at the hollow shell of a sacred place, and breathed. This was what the earth did. It took what was abandoned, and reclaimed it.

They reached a high vantage point, and could finally see the lake fully. It looked as if a vast hole had opened up in the earth, and someone had poured the sky into it, so perfect was the reflection of the blue, with its changeable drifting clouds, gray-lined and mercurial.

“Here, I think,” Aziraphale said. His voice was quiet, cautious of popping this perfect golden soap bubble of a morning. Crowley unpacked a wool blanket, shaking it out and laying it over the top of the grassy hillside. The picnic basket offered up a variety of sandwiches, pastries with cheese filling, and apples.

“They keep, you know,” Aziraphale explained. “With the weather as it is, the harvest of other fruits has been delayed. These are last year’s apples.”

“Heard about that. Grape harvests freezing on the vines. Fruit rotting on branches. Cows dying in the fields because of a sudden blizzard. Makes you wonder.”

Aziraphale’s mouth is a thin, downturned line, and there is tension in his shoulders. “Best not to, really.”

“Makes the humans wonder. They’re saying it’s the end of the world.”

Aziraphale hands are putting wrinkles into the fabric of his trousers where they have knotted themselves into white-knuckled fists. “Silly of them. It’s too early.”

Crowley watches him for a moment, and then sighs. “Yeah, silly.” He eats his sandwich in silence, watching clouds drift in the sky above the lake. After he finishes the apple, he tucks the core carefully back into the picnic basket, so that it can be disposed of once they return to the cottage.

Aziraphale has his notebook out, and is staring at the blank page with a sort of existential dread. “I never know how to start. There are so many things I want to say, so many words I could use, but what if I use the wrong ones. They’re on the page, then, I can’t take them back.”

“If you think all your brilliant poets and novelists got it right from the first words, that they weren’t writing rubbish and then tossing it onto the fire to hide their shame, you’re kidding yourself.”

“That’s different. They’re writers! That’s craftsmanship.”

“And you’re pretending to be a writer. Just… start with, ‘It was a dark and stormy night,’ or something.”

Aziraphale stared at him. “It’s not. It’s barely midday, and the sun is so bright that the lake looks like silver.”

“There you go. Write that.”

Aziraphale looked as though he wanted to continue arguing for a moment, but finally conceded, and turned his attention back to the page. His handwriting was small and precise.

Crowley pulled out his sketchbook and pencil case, and began drawing. The shifting wisps of cloud and the slopes of the hills took shape slowly under his hands. He kept getting distracted as he glanced up at the landscape around him for reference; his eyes would inevitably catch, instead, on Aziraphale, who was chewing his lip as he frowned at his notebook. Crowley sighed, and let himself sketch a small figure seated under a stand of oak and alder trees, a book open in its lap. It was tiny in the vastness of the landscape that Crowley had created, but the eye was drawn to it. The chalk pencil made it seem illuminated by light, like the still surface of the lake.

Aziraphale was writing more easily now, unhurried but focused. A ladybird was trying to scale the edge of his notebook, where it had brushed against the blades of grass. Finally, his words slowed and stopped, and he took a deep, satisfied breath.

Crowley stretched, abandoning his second sketch of the afternoon, which had turned into a series of studies of Aziraphale’s features. He’d meant to draw the cluster of yellow flowers a few feet from the angel. He’d just… gotten distracted.

Aziraphale was studying Crowley’s landscape sketch, set aside after he had finished it. Crowley felt a bit self-conscious, and wondered if Aziraphale had taken note of the tiny figure reading beneath the trees. 

“I’d like to keep this,” Aziraphale said, and his voice was soft and even.

Crowley ducked his head and shrugged. “Yeah, sure, course you can.”

“Thank you.” Aziraphale carefully tucked the sketch between the leaves of his notepad.

The lake was even more bright than it had been before, as the sun shone fiercely down on it, despite the threatening-looking slate-gray thunderheads massing in the western portion of the sky. 

“It’s like a snuff box,” Aziraphale noted, looking delighted.

Crowley stared at him blankly.

“Those little silver ones, with the dainty engraving and filigree,” Aziraphale explained, and produced one from his pocket, to Crowley’s surprise.

“Snuff? Really?”

Aziraphale looked impatient. “Don’t be ridiculous. Snuff is disgusting. It’s the boxes that are interesting. I collect them, you know.” 

Crowley had not known. He wondered what else he still had to learn about Aziraphale, despite having known him for millenia. Crowley turned the box over in his hands, it was a simple one, oval in shape and nearly flat. It was highly polished and smooth, like the lake, with simple whorls of engraving along the edge, like the breaking of small waves. It looked a bit like an oversized locket. Crowley tried to hand it back to Aziraphale, but the angel waved him off.

“Keep it. A souvenir of the day.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> 1) They were crumpled at the very back of his desk drawer, hidden behind a bottle of mastiha liqueur, the cursed black pearl of the Borgias, and a copy of Mansfield Park, where he would be unlikely to stumble upon them. Crowley normally preferred to pretend that the commendations did not exist, because they reminded him of the sobering fact that human beings were better at doing his job, than he, a demon, was.  
> 2) Crowley would never reveal it to Aziraphale, but he had a secret collection of romance novels and penny dreadful thrillers. He was particularly fond of stories about star-crossed lovers, but only if they ended happily.  
> 3) Well, mostly. The puddles from the rainstorm the day before had definite aspirations towards lakehood.  
> 4) One of the advantages of being an angel is not needing to sleep. Another is the ability to function as your own reading light. Aziraphale found a halo very multi-functional.


End file.
